In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party has suffered an electoral blow in Berlin state elections, two weeks after her Christian Democrats (CDU) party came third in an eastern state amid a growing backlash against her immigration policy.
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The election observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Europe’s rights and security watchdog, said Sunday’s election for seats in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, was “transparently administered”, but that “challenges to democratic commitments remain”.
The chief of the Russian Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, said in a televised briefing that she sees no reason to nullify results in any location in the country, despite reports of election fraud.
United Russia, led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a loyalist of President Putin, now has 238 of 450 Duma seats and dominates the more than 80 regional parliaments.
Russian president Vladimir Putin again won reelection in a national election amid record low voter turn-out of 47.8 percent, and his United Russia party took 53 percent of the vote. The monitor said the elections represented an improvement over parliamentary elections of 2011-which yielded allegations of widespread voter fraud-but that Russian Federation still faces a “long and hard road to reform”.
“It means that the people see that delegates from United Russia, the leading political party, are really working for them”.
Kremlin supporters have so far valued what is seen as tough leadership more than concerns about which direction that authority is taking Russian Federation. However, these parties failed to get over the 5 percent threshold, a requirement for the State Duma. The last parliament was elected on party lists alone. Representatives of the Motherland and the Civil Platform parties received one place each through elections in independent constituencies and one seat went to an independent candidate.
“There is no question, we didn’t get a good result in Berlin today”, said Michael Grosse-Broemer, a senior CDU politician. “But it is not so, it is as we expected”.
The Interfax news agency quoted Ilya Shablinsky, a coordinator of observers for the presidential Council on Human Rights, saying that information about violations was coming constantly from various regions.
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Golos, an independent monitoring group, said it received nearly 700 complaints, such as ballot stuffing and multiple voting, including one in which a bus full of workers was seen at seven polling stations in Moscow.
